I start the new year reminding myself that art goes beyond the artist’s person, art is an action sometimes opening eyes and heart, our intimate perception, in moments of clarity: we can see how things are. Then we cover them up quickly, as if they were sounds of one note that doesn’t becomes music unless other notes come around to give her meaning in a collective song. As we keep going we forget, looking for the next change, hoping not to be stuck, filled with disquiet, on a doorstep that leads to nothing, to pages that never turn, where stories have lost the possibility to be told.

Adela Goldbard is a Mexican artist. Part of her family went to Mexico from Poland and Lithuania; her name has European roots, but Mexico is her home. The body of her art not older than ten years. It’s a body well fed by concepts received through other contemporary artists, conceptual in the first place. I look at her work and hear Chris Burden telling me of his attention to relics, that are wrecks with no value, signs for memory. Lived life doesn’t come back. He adds, “I thought: a few minutes of performance, that I will never redo… it becomes a myth.” “You can make your tombstone out of cardboard, but then the graveyard won’t look real, will it?” “What’s real? What does it cost to do that?”

What’s real for Adela Goldbard as an artist? At the beginning it was one photographic image, the instant life of places in which she had introduced imaginary alterations in a physical way, with real objects: little red horses on a dry road, hats in the air, books among sheep on a field of grass. I wonder at her listening to dust, water, grass and landscapes who are perhaps asking for surprising horses, or dreamed flowers in a lake.

Those foreign objects are placed with gentleness to play with the natural scene, not to hurt, they are only fleeting guests introduced by an artist. Images, one for each place, become crystals of memory. Some facets from the past, some of them completely new.

Down to the soles of my feet. Down to the palms of my hands. At the apex of my thought. At the core of my extremities.

My spirit has feet, my soul has hands, my veins leave tracks, pulses of time and the way.

I can talk with the dawn, can submerge myself in turbid waters of torrential rivers, barefoot can walk up the incline, can hurl my song against the wind.Indigenous poem from Mazatec, Mexico*

Did she feel like the woman of this indigenous Mexican poem? If Adela’s images are symbols, they seem to bring up a sense of resistance, an attempt at not stifling the art piece within only one meaning, or a simple verbal definition.

Quite rapidly Adela Goldbard started to interact with the Mexican human landscape: a texture of unexplained killings, social inequality, small airplanes or helicopters crashing with no survivors for the governmental or military members traveling in them; the feeling of an undeclared, bloody war tearing into pieces the canvas of peoples’ daily life; layers of cultural and religious veils wrapping the souls of the forgotten and the unconsoled, and infusing an extraordinary creative ability into their hands.

Their hands met with hers. Not only helping her to build three dimensional copies of newspaper images, the crashed small airplanes and helicopters becoming in their sculptural form visual monuments once more hiding from the viewers, as before to the readers, the reasons for the deadly accidents. The artist made them as white as silence. She kept the final photographic image and destroyed the piece. Little by little, Goldbard’s art makes tangible one of the still most diffused of our illusions: the belief that a written report, or a paper body, allow us to see and understand what really happened. So, if they are paper tigers, what to do with them? And how to preserve some sparkles of memory? Her answer is: by destruction. Let’s remake them and blow them up. How much I wish she would do it with the Tower of Pisa!

Monuments become a stop, a hole in the human landscape. Yet it is precisely what we don’t know that makes them attractive. During the making of her artworks, supported by many many hands of Mexican builders, Adela Goldbard felt her art had something in common with allegorical meanings of local rituals, older than the Spanish colonization. In some cases intertwined with Christian stories: the image of Judas for instance, burned out by fireworks in a search of purification. And her artworks, as she says, do work “opening space and time, expanding through a collaborative effort, then closing again.” No illusion, once again. If nothing else, they are a vibrant, heartfelt restitution of feelings to people used and abused by various powers over their heads. An ephemeral explosion of laughter and fears: Goldbard’s most recent work comes from three years of preparation and blew up in twenty five minutes. The soundtrack in the Pomona College Bixby Plaza spreads real gunshots, screams and groans, the voices of violence in Mexico. The action displays the unofficial protest of an artist who knows where she belongs, how much she, we all, transpire the air and the soil we walk on. The title, hard to believe, is in the lyrics of a song made by Walt Disney: It’s a small world after all. She let it enter her mind, didn’t push it away.

A WORLD OF LAUGHTER, A WORLD OF FEARS

Concert for sounds and pyrotechnic colors and action

Bixby Plaza, Pomona College (CA)November 18, 2017

Video – Courtesy of the artist and Pomona College Museum of Art

Photographic documentation:

Photo: Peter Kirby

Photo: Peter Kirby

Photo: Hannah Kirby

Photo: Hannah Kirby

Photo: Hannah Kirby

Photo: Hannah Kirby

Photo: Hannah Kirby

Photo: Hannah Kirby

Photo: Hannah Kirby

Photo: Hannah Kirby

Here the fiesta ends / the road is closed, the song is over. / Lucidity is lingering in the copal, / kernels of corn close up their pages, / standing guard over the journey’s secrets.

A mystery is disappearing, / new ways emerging, ways to fathom life. / The birds trace paths, the earth is fasting. / The moon confides her troubles to the sun / and dawn shakes loose on the horizon.

Here the fiesta ends, / the song rests in the morning’s arms. / The children who spring forth open the world’s heart, / nature is sending signals.

Indigenous poem from Mazatec (Mexico)**

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The two stanzas are the n.8 and 10 from a poem translated by Jerome Rothenberg in Like A New Sun: New Indigenous Mexican Poetry, edited by Victor Teran & David Shook (Los Angeles, Phoneme Media, 2015). I read them in Jerome Rothenberg, Technicians of the Sacred, University of California press, 2017, pp. 364 and 365. Thank you Jerry!